Archive for August 2009

When you look at the amusement business, you expect to see facilities try what they can do differently to pull people into their premises but I have to admit that I never had thought of a hypnotist as being one of those um…perks. Such will be the case at the Chessington World of Adventures in the UK where after surveying some of their younger audience found that kids were “annoyed by parents reluctant to go on the white knuckle rides.” The solution: hire a hypnotist to hypnotize said reluctant parents so they will no longer have a problem with such rides. While it remains to be seen how many people will go for such hypnotherapy, you have to hand it to World of Adventures for trying out something different.

It looks like the arena of card-based coin-op games is beginning to heat up – first with Sega and now LAI Games is going to bring one a title over from Indonesia (the game made its debut at the Timezone there a little over a year ago) to the US that uses a similar concept. Called Dino Duel, the game dispenses cards that players can then use in the game or in a separate card game where ever they so happen to be. When you insert a coin the game will dispense a card for the player to grab. Then they scan the card in the reader and depending on what the card is it will affect the gameplay, which uses a rock/paper/scissors interface that is easy for kids to pick up on.

One distributor already has the game in-stock and for a surprisingly low price for an arcade title as well. I imagine that we’ll be seeing this at AMOA as well so now the question is, how many other manufacturers are going to jump onto the card game bandwagon now? As for a dinosaur themed game, my three year old son would absolutely go bonkers over that (as he would other such themed titles) although he’s still a little too young to get the part with the cards.

Here is one video I found of the game on Youtube. There is another, less choppy video of the game that can be found here.

Despite what anyone might say about the current state of pinball, there are still many fans out there that love the game enough to get together and hold some excellent competitions. One such competition just saw it’s 12th installment, the Pinball World Championships in Carnegie, PA. Over 400 games were brought together under one 30,000 sq. ft. roof over four days for the playing enjoyment of more than 2000 people. With numbers like that, you can’t argue against it and on top of that, it looks like it was a lot of fun. One website, Crispy Gamer has a rundown of the competition, replete with photos like the one above.

UPDATE: I forgot that there was a topic on this very subject on our forums. Igo points out that Nick from PressStartComic made a video of the event.

It looks like Arcana Heart fans have another title in the series to look forward to, with Examu launching a teaser site for Arcana Heart 3 today. As it’s a teaser site there are basically no details available on the game at this time except that it will run on the ex-board again. As you might recall Arcana Heart 2 did get a small “official” release in the US when Andamiro brought the game over last year at AMOA 2008 so I wonder if they will do the same thing again with AH3.

We mentioned not too long ago that Incredible Technologies would be ramping up to deliver their most recent Golden Tee creation to the public and with that date fast approaching, they have begun to unload the details on what will make GT2010 different from past GT games. Skins makes a comeback, Jim Nantz and Peter Jacobsen have recorded over 5,000 lines of commentary for the game and they have added on the Facebook updating feature that we mentioned last time. The game ships on October 1st and it comes in the new IT Showcase cabinet which all of their games are now using. I could discuss everything they added to the game in this part of the post but they sent along a 5-page press release detailing everything you’ll ever want to know about GT2010 short of playing it, so I’ll just post that after the break and you can go from there.

If you went out of your way to print off those paper arcade cabinets but wanted something a little bit more solid, then this is for you. Instead of flimsy, rippable paper, these bad boys are made out of plywood and come with stickers to plaster onto the cab. They make great props for your action figure collection to take part in or if you need to decorate an arcade or game room with something neat, then these should also serve a cool purpose. I’m sure that no one will be getting them just for their action figures – right?

I missed this one by several days but I figure it’s worth mentioning anyways despite that. Konami is now testing the latest iteration of their Pop’n Music bemani series in Japan, Pop’n Music 18 Sengoku Retsuden. The subtitle refers to the warring states era that has been seen in many different games like Samurai Warriors and similar titles. A little more info can be found at BemaniStyle.com.